Migrating Applications to Public Cloud Services: Roadmap for Success

Transcription

1 Migrating Applications to Public Cloud Services: Roadmap for Success December, 2013

2 Contents Acknowledgements... 3 Executive Overview... 4 Motivation and Considerations... 5 Migration Roadmap... 6 Step 1: Assess your Applications and Workloads... 6 Step 2: Build a Business Case... 8 Step 3: Develop a Technical Approach Step 4: Adopt a Flexible Integration Model Step 5: Address Security & Privacy Requirements Step 6: Manage the Migration Works Cited Additional References Appendix A: Examples of Cloud-ready Workloads Appendix B: Application Migration Tasks - Example Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 2

3 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council. All rights reserved. You may download, store, display on your computer, view, print, and link to the Migrating Existing Applications to the Cloud: Roadmap for Success white paper at the Cloud Standards Customer Council Web site subject to the following: (a) the document may be used solely for your personal, informational, non-commercial use; (b) the document may not be modified or altered in any way; (c) the document may not be redistributed; and (d) the trademark, copyright or other notices may not be removed. You may quote portions of the document as permitted by the Fair Use provisions of the United States Copyright Act, provided that you attribute the portions to the Cloud Standards Customer Council Migrating Applications to Public Cloud Services: Roadmap for Success (2013). Acknowledgements The major contributors to this whitepaper are: Claude Baudoin (cébé IT & Knowledge Management), Chris Carlson (Retriever Consulting), Giuseppina Cretella (Second University of Naples), Beniamino Di Martino (Second University of Naples), Mike Edwards (IBM), Shamun Mahmud (DLT Solutions), John McDonald (CloudOne), John Meegan (IBM), Sujatha Perepa (IBM), Keith Prabhu (Confidis), Ram Ravishankar (IBM), Michael Salsburg (Unisys), Muralidhar Seelam (IBM) and Joe Talik (AT&T). Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 3

4 Executive Overview Across all industries, momentum is building to migrate applications to cloud computing. While cost savings, speed of deployment and scalability top the list of business motivations, an increasing number of enterprises view cloud computing as a key enabler of business transformation that can help improve customer engagement, forge new partnerships and drive competitive advantage. However, the migration of applications to cloud computing must be done in a strategic and methodical manner. Existing enterprise applications must be thoroughly assessed to determine which workloads can benefit most from early migration to the cloud. Key considerations including costs of migration, application redesign, application performance and availability, security and privacy requirements, and regulatory requirements must be taken into account. An enterprise strategy for cloud computing must identify individual business problems with existing applications that cloud computing can potentially address and provide specific business justification that the cloud is the right strategic alternative. A business case for migrating applications to the cloud must describe the current state and demonstrate the advantages of cloud computing to not only reduce costs but also deliver meaningful business value. In most cases, starting small and expanding after initial success has been proven as the most prudent approach to application migration to the cloud. It often makes sense to start with the most cloud-ready applications those with minimal customer data and other sensitive information or applications that derive the most immediate advantage from the cloud s elasticity. Create a pilot for one or two of these types of applications, test thoroughly, and gather customer feedback so that improvements can be made before going live. Once the application migration processes have been proven and required cloud computing skills have been developed, migration of more business-critical applications can be considered. The aim of this guide is to provide a practical reference to help enterprise information technology (IT) and business decision makers analyze and consider application migration to cloud computing. The paper focuses primarily on the migration of applications to public cloud services. It includes a list of steps, along with guidance and strategies, that takes into consideration both business and technical requirements. The section titled Motivation and Considerations provides an overview of the potential impact that the migration of enterprise applications to cloud computing will have on new and existing business processes. This section provides guidance on the types of applications that are best suited for migration to the cloud. The section titled Migration Roadmap is the heart of the guide and includes the basic steps of a formalized migration process. It details both strategic and tactical activities for decision makers to develop a business plan and detailed migration plan. Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 4

5 Motivation and Considerations The business community might have the following motivations for the migration of an application to the cloud: Broader reach Easier mobile access Business agility and flexibility Improved security Improved responsiveness Better analytics on application usage Improved availability Reduced and/or re-allocated costs Most of these objectives are well matched by the some key cloud computing characteristics: Rapid elasticity. The ability to rapidly scale the IT infrastructure up or down to match changing requirements, on a pay-per-use basis, is extremely attractive to large and small organizations alike. A cloud computing environment offers increased resources which can lead to performance improvements for certain applications. Applications that are designed to spread their workload across multiple servers will be able to benefit from automated scaling of resources to match the current demand. This is especially appealing for applications with unpredictable or cyclical usage patterns, because a cloud orchestration tool can monitor usage and can dynamically scale resources up or down. This behavior combined with the pay-by-usage characteristic of a cloud can lead to significant financial savings. Pay-as-you-go versus install-and-own. The shift in up-front capital requirements from the customer to the service provider is equally attractive. In particular, small organizations and start-ups face much lower infrastructure costs than were necessary pre-cloud. Organization streamlining. Buying capabilities such as security as a service, collaboration as a service, communication as a service, etc., decreases the need for specialized in-house IT skills and can remove some of IT s greatest non-value-adding challenges. The main concerns when thinking about cloud computing are: Security. Moving your data and code to a third party provider creates some security risks. Although the technology to make cloud computing safe is available, securing cloud workloads often requires new concepts and skills that may take time to acquire. Loss of control. For software-as-a-service (SaaS) and some platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, the entire control of hardware, software, security policies, etc, is placed in the hands of a third party provider. Integration. Most customers will need to integrate internal systems with cloud systems. Having these two systems communicate with each other is always a challenge. Availability and reliability of cloud applications. Issues may arise from a combination of server performance, configuration errors, network design, and application architecture, possibly in combination, which can initially make them difficult to resolve. Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 5

6 Cloud service provider lock-in. The concern is that once a cloud service of one provider is adopted, it will not be easy to switch to using an equivalent cloud service of a different provider. Emerging standards will increase the portability and interoperability of systems across cloud service providers, and will reduce or eliminate this current barrier to cloud adoption. To prioritize applications for migration to cloud computing, it is necessary to first identify and understand the business and technical factors for the migration. Migration Roadmap As customers transition their applications and data to cloud computing, it is important that the level of service provided in the cloud environment be comparable to the service provided by their traditional IT environment. Failure to properly migrate applications to cloud computing could ultimately result in higher costs and potential loss of business, thus canceling any of the potential benefits of cloud computing. This section provides a prescriptive series of steps end users should take to ensure successful migration of existing applications to cloud computing: 1. Assess your Applications and Workloads 2. Build the Business Case 3. Develop the Technical Approach 4. Adopt a Flexible Integration Model 5. Address Security and Privacy Requirements 6. Manage the Migration Requirements and best practices are highlighted for each step in the sections that follow. Step 1: Assess your Applications and Workloads Assessing applications and workloads for cloud readiness allows organizations to determine what applications and data can and cannot be readily moved to a cloud environment and what delivery models (public, private, or hybrid) can be supported. It often makes sense to start with the lowest-risk applications those with minimal customer data and other sensitive information or applications that take advantage of the cloud s elasticity. Alternatively, you might start by determining which applications you do not want to move to the cloud initially. The decision criteria may be refined as the assessment progresses. Table 1 highlights suitable and less suitable types of applications for migration to cloud computing. Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 6

7 Suitable Candidates for Cloud Applications that are used by a group of mobile workers to manage their time and activity, and that contribute only limited information to the company's broad management information databases. Applications that are run infrequently but require significant computing resources when they run. Applications that are run in a time zone different from that where your company's IT personnel are located. Development, testing and prototyping of application changes, even if the final applications will be run on your own infrastructure. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. Less Suitable Candidates for Cloud Applications that involve extremely sensitive data, particularly where there is a regulatory or legal risk involved in any disclosure. These will at minimum require special treatment if they are to be run in a cloud service. Applications now being run on the company's private network and that are very performance-sensitive. Applications that require frequent and/or voluminous transactions against an onpremises database that cannot be migrated to cloud computing. Applications that run on legacy platforms that are typically not supported (or may not be supported in the long run) by cloud providers. Table 1: Application Candidates for Migration to Cloud Computing The readiness assessment spans the following areas: Business Considerations. Business considerations include the overall organizational readiness for using cloud computing. Is the application owner willing and comfortable with a cloud platform? How important is the application to the business or the mission? What is the risk tolerance level of the business, and is the culture favorable or resistant to change? Application Lifecycle Considerations. Is the application still being defined? Is it up for a refresh? Is the application approaching retirement? Can the application be redesigned or undergo a technology refresh for cloud computing? Will there be an efficiency gain in using cloud computing? Instead of migrating the existing application to cloud computing, using an IaaS or PaaS approach, would it be better to replace it with a new SaaS solution? Application Architecture Considerations. Is the application web-based, or built with a serviceoriented architecture (SOA)? If not, is the application such that it can be split into modular services? Is it monolithic, two-tier, three-tier, or n-tier? What is the level of effort required to modularize it or separate the tiers? Does the application scale out? Does it scale up? What are the demand fluctuations in the application? What impact will moving to cloud computing have on demand? Data Considerations. Data governance, confidentiality, integrity and quality need to be preserved by the migration. Is the data bound by statutory compliance? Are there data sensitivity and privacy or confidentiality concerns? What data integrity concerns are there? How does the application manage data requests from a safety and security perspective? How much data exchange will occur between the components of the application and between the application and the user? Frequent data transfers may impose a higher cost as well as a performance lag. Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 7

8 Technology Considerations. These include the performance and resiliency of the network infrastructure. The migration design must account for multiple components communicating across network boundaries. Techniques such as network isolation, virtual private networks, elastic addressing and network segmentation can provide for a very robust and secure cloud environment. Ensure the application is designed (or can be modified) for resiliency immunity to the interruption of transactions in midstream, as well as local fault tolerance. Is the application designed for high availability and disaster recovery? Finally, standard and open protocols are more readily supported across firewalls and on a public infrastructure than proprietary ones. Security Considerations. The different parties application owner, cloud service provider(s) and the customer s IT department must understand that security is their joint responsibility. Authentication and authorization remain the responsibility of the customer at the application level. The cloud service provider is responsible for security controls, identification and correction of system vulnerabilities, and defense against specific cloud-oriented attacks (e.g., at the virtual machine level), consistent with the level of service selected. Continuous monitoring is now common among cloud service providers and should be expected. Integration Considerations. What are the dependencies between the application being migrated and other systems? Applications may depend on each other through control integration (they invoke each other), data integration (they read or write the same databases or files), or presentation integration (they are mashed up on the same window or Web page). The migrated application may even be the system of record for some key data in a Master Data Management (MDM) scheme. Finally, the migrated application may rely on common facilities such as a user directory for single sign-on and access control. The assessment must discover how extensive these integrations are, what protocols they use, what additional utilities or runtime libraries they rely on, and what their performance requirements are, including the frequency of connections and the amount of data involved. Appendix A provides examples of some of the most cloud-ready workloads and their benefits. Step 2: Build a Business Case Developing a business case for migrating applications to cloud computing requires an overall cloud computing strategy and specific information that describes the current state and demonstrates the advantages of cloud computing to not only reduce costs but to deliver meaningful business value. High level value propositions for cloud computing, including the shift of capital expenditures (CAPEX) to operational expenses (OPEX), cost savings, faster speed of deployment, elasticity, etc., are necessary but insufficient unless quantified. Within the context of an enterprise strategy for cloud computing, individual business problems with existing applications that cloud computing can potentially address need to be identified, and specific business justification must prove that cloud computing is the right strategic alternative. Refer to the CSCC Practical Guide to Cloud Computing for specific considerations that need to be taken into account when developing an enterprise strategy for cloud computing. [1] Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 8

9 Cost Analysis Once an application is identified as a potential candidate for migration to cloud computing, a thorough cost analysis must be performed. In order for meaningful comparisons to be made, one must have specific baseline costs for the current environment. The overall cost of application migration to cloud computing must include the following elements: On-going cloud service costs. The cloud service provider fees must be taken into account, including the effects of variable demand, such as extra fees to handle peak loads. Service management. Managing services and service providers is a skill that is often not well developed in firms, and yet it is of critical importance to the success of cloud computing. License management. It is important to understand third-party software dependencies and impact to licensing contracts (and ongoing management of these licenses) when migrating an application to cloud computing. Application re-designs. The application may require design changes in order to be compatible with or to take full advantage of cloud deployment. Application deployment and testing. Once the application has gone through design changes it must be configured, deployed, and tested in the cloud environment. Application maintenance and administration. Ongoing maintenance and administration of the cloud-based application will remain the client s responsibility. Application integration. In many cases, there will be a need for connections between the migrated application and applications and data that remain in-house, potentially requiring new integration software. Cost of developing cloud skills. Internal personnel may need to be trained to support the migration to cloud computing. Human resources and talent management implications. New skills and abilities such as preparation and deployment of virtual machine images may require changes to supervisory, control and compensation systems. Job descriptions, bonus plans, etc. may change. Service Levels In addition to assessing the costs of application migration, it is equally important to ensure that the level of service provided by the cloud-based application will be comparable to current service levels. The required service levels should be agreed with the cloud service provider and explicitly documented in the cloud service agreement. In fact, the service levels provided by an internal IT department to its business customers are often not well specified, or not specified at all. Migrating an application to cloud computing places a spotlight on those essential commitments. Refer to the CSCC Practical Guide to Cloud Service Agreements and the CSCC Public Cloud Service Agreements: What to Expect and What to Negotiate for specific considerations that need to be taken into account when developing an enterprise strategy for cloud computing. [2,3] For each application being migrated to cloud computing, consider the following application characteristics: Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 9

10 Application availability. The criticality of the application to business operations will determine the availability requirements that must be clearly specified in the cloud SLA. Application performance. Depending on the performance requirements of the application, specific performance targets may need to be achievable with the cloud service. Application security. Moving an application to the cloud will require due diligence on the part of the cloud service customer to ensure proper security controls are in place and operating effectively. Privacy. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) handled by a cloud-based application must be properly stored and maintained. Access to PII stored in a cloud service must be restricted as required, including from cloud service provider personnel. Regulatory compliance. Government and industry regulations may require additional measures, such as restricting the migrated applications and data to reside in a specific geographic region. Business Impact Assuming the cost and service analyses described above are favorable, then additional business factors must be weighed in order to develop a complete business analysis, and should be monitored on an ongoing basis: Revenue impact. If the application is used to generate revenue, is the move to cloud computing expected to increase that revenue? Customer acquisition or engagement impact. For a customer-facing application, is the move to cloud computing expected to increase the number of customers accessing it? User satisfaction. Does one expect an improvement in availability or response times that will result in increased user satisfaction? Time to market improvements. Will the move to cloud computing shorten the time it takes to deliver functional enhancements to end users? Cost of handling peak loads. The cost of scaling server capacity up and down to match spikes in demand for the cloud-based application should be compared with similar costs before migration. Obtaining executive support for the initiative is critical. Executives from IT, Lines of Business (LOBs), procurement and executive management must review and approve the business plan before proceeding. Getting key executives on-board early in the process will help alleviate potential issues down the line. Step 3: Develop a Technical Approach Broadly speaking, there are two potential target service models for the migration of an existing application Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS Migration To use a PaaS cloud service as the target for migration, the application itself must be designed for one or more runtime environments available in the target PaaS service. An example of such an application is Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 10

11 one where the business logic is implemented as a set of components which run on an application server (such as IBM's WebSphere, Oracle's WebLogic, or the JBoss server) in combination with a database (such as the Oracle database or IBM's DB2) containing the application's data and also possibly associated code in the form of stored procedures. In general, a PaaS solution must provide the elements of the particular software stack required by applications such as the operating system, an application server and a database, so that the customer only has to be concerned with the specific application components and data. One must also ensure that the PaaS environment offers the configuration(s) required by the application. This may include software levels, the ability to run scripts, and the presence of certain tools for setup, reporting, monitoring, etc., identical or similar to those present before migration. IaaS Migration To migrate an application to an IaaS service, the requirements on the cloud service itself tend to be lower. The entire software stack is migrated: the application code itself, plus any supporting code it requires including the underlying operating system. To achieve this, it must be possible to package the complete software stack as one or more virtual machine (VM) images, which can then be copied into the cloud service and executed there. Whether the software stack involved will work in a virtual machine environment may depend on whether there is use of specialized device drivers or hardware devices that are unlikely to be supported by an IaaS provider; an application depending on these capabilities is not a good candidate for migration. This can be tested by preparing the virtual machine image of the application and of the supporting code and attempting to execute it on a trial VM environment (either in-house or a test system offered by the cloud service provider). Hidden dependencies can thus be found, corrected, and the process repeated until successful or until it is determined that there is no affordable solution. Common Technical Considerations In both the PaaS and IaaS cases, the following technical considerations must be taken into account: Skills. The organization needs to possess, or to be able to acquire, the skills necessary to prepare and migrate the application components. The preparation of virtual machine images and their deployment to a cloud service may involve skills new to the organization, and this must be considered in the project plan. Security. Ensuring appropriate security of the application and its data is vital. The cloud service s security features may be very different from those of the in-house environment, and the security risks and the measures applied to counter them must be assessed carefully. For example, if the application is only used by staff working for the organization, then it may be wise to place the application within a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in the cloud service, providing secured access for staff while preventing access from outsiders over the internet. Data that is migrated to a cloud service needs similar technical decisions can the data be stored in clear text, or does it need to be encrypted, even at rest, to reduce the risk of exposure or theft? Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 11

12 Other technical choices depend on the security measures applied by the cloud provider to the cloud service. Does the provider implement strong user authentication techniques for the service? Does the provider offer security tools or services, for example to implement encryption of data in transit or at rest? Integration. Integration with other applications and services within the customer organization, which may be bidirectional, may involve configuration changes (e.g., to reflect new addresses), new authentication methods, and other technical changes to avoid network latency and throughput issues that may impact the performance of the application or its dependent systems. This is addressed in greater depth in Step 4. Note that the current absence of integration or interoperability between two applications does not mean that such a need will not arise later as the result of a change in business requirements. Monitoring and Management. The monitoring and management of the application running in the cloud service must be considered. Can in-house tools still be used, or is it necessary to adapt to new monitoring and management facilities supplied by the cloud service? Monitoring resource usage by the application is important, since undetected high usage is likely to inflate the cloud service usage fees. Scalability. While scalability is a common advantage of cloud services, applications have to be structured appropriately to take advantage of scalable cloud resources, and this may require changes to the application code. In particular, the challenge of reprogramming an application to use multiple processors or multiple machines in parallel can be significant. Availability and Backup. In-house designs to support the availability of the application may need significant adaptation to deal with the cloud service environment, especially for PaaS services. Backup processes for the application may need to be adapted to the environment of the cloud service. These technical considerations must feed back into the business case for migration and possibly may call into question its very feasibility. The technical issues also feed into the migration plan (refer to Step 6 for details). Patterns One approach that may help with the migration of applications to cloud computing is the use of patterns. Patterns describe common aspects of cloud computing environments and of application design for cloud computing. Some patterns can be useful in understanding the appropriate organization of the software stacks on which applications depend. Patterns can also be useful in understanding what changes may be necessary to the application code for successful migration to the cloud computing environment. Some of the general patterns which apply to cloud computing are described in the paper "A Collection of Patterns for Cloud Types, Cloud Service Models, and Cloud-based Application Architectures." [4] Patterns can also be specific to a cloud computing platform like those provided by Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and others. [5] [6] [7] Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 12

13 Step 4: Adopt a Flexible Integration Model It is common for an application being migrated to a cloud service to have connections of various kinds with other applications and systems; therefore, the application owners need to understand the impact of these connections and address it. Integration between applications is typically classified into three types: Process (or control) integration, where an application invokes another in order to execute a certain workflow Data integration, where applications share common data, or one application s output becomes another application s input Presentation integration, where multiple applications present their results simultaneously to a user through a dashboard or mashup. The purpose of these integrations may be to perform an end-to-end workflow that crosses the boundaries between multiple business capabilities or systems (for example, entering a transaction in an accounts receivable system when a customer places an order in an e-commerce application). Another form of integration is when the migrated application must continue to be monitored and managed by an existing suite of on-premises IT tools. In many cases, the challenge is not so much integration as it is re-integration or maintaining the integration between pieces of the entire system that are coupled in a certain way. The first task in addressing integration is to inventory the connections or integration points in question. Below are two examples. Note that a variety of approaches may be used to address the challenges, and there is usually not a single one that works in all cases. Therefore, we recommend that integration approaches: be flexible, potentially including several different techniques according to specific situations; be based on standards, in order to be more maintainable and less fragile with respect to changes the cloud provider might make; consider the possibility that more migrations may occur in the future therefore cloud migration is an opportunity to modernize the architecture and render it more resilient to such changes. Example 1. One application may invoke another in order to execute a certain business process. For example, at a company that has automated the processing of vendor invoices, an application used to receive goods on the delivery dock may communicate with an ERP application to check that the received goods were ordered and, if so, to record the delivery, which then schedules the payment of the amount specified in the invoice received electronically from the vendor. Consider what happens if the receiving application is migrated to a cloud service, and the ERP application remains in-house. What protocols do these applications use to talk to each other? Can the same connection continue working, that is, is the protocol supported by the cloud provider, and if it is, does the response time remain adequate, given the frequency of these transactions, the size of the payload, and the bandwidth of the connection to the cloud service? In this situation, the architects and developers have several options: Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 13

14 The existing communication between applications may work perfectly well, both in terms of the communication protocol being supported across the Internet, but also in terms of performance. The connection may need to be slightly redesigned to use a standard protocol that the cloudbased system supports, or to streamline the payload of the messages in order to avoid performance issues. An on-premises mirror of certain key information (in the above example, a list of purchase order numbers and line items, including vendor part numbers and quantities) may need to serve as a proxy cache for the application now located in the cloud, so that the real-time responsiveness of the on-premises application is not affected (it might even improve!). This solution has significant implications in turn: the mirror needs to be kept up to date at a suitable frequency, the application may still need to be modified to access the mirrored data, etc. A more substantial architectural change may be required. This may in turn take several forms: 1. Using SOA to replace a legacy architecture 2. Using an established message-based integration approach, such as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), that is compatible with Internet-based communications. In fact, extending the concept of service bus so that it can be used between on-premises and cloud-based systems is a recent trend followed by multiple providers. 3. Using special cloud integration solutions, typically based on customizable templates, specifically designed to connect cloud solutions to internal enterprise applications. Refer to step 7 of the CSCC whitepaper Convergence of Social, Mobile and Cloud: 7 Steps to Ensure Success for more details. [8] If we generalize this example, the customer s systems, including the ones targeted for migration to cloud computing as well as those that will remain on-premises, often have many connections. In the worst case, N applications each connect to the other N-1, creating N x (N-1) associations. In such a case, migrating one or more applications to use cloud computing presents a challenge whose complexity depends on the way in which the applications connect: If a proprietary message queuing protocol is used, that protocol may not be supported (or may run into performance issues) across the connection between the enterprise s network and the cloud provider s systems. If an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is used, the issue may be less acute, as an ESB is designed to hide the protocol differences across different links. It is therefore possible to replace the protocol used between the migrated application and the ESB with another one, without requiring a change in any of the other applications. Only the migrated application may need to be tweaked. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) does not remove this problem. With SOA, each application exposes some services, the connections use Web protocols, but the N x (N-1) connection issue remains, therefore each application that connects to the migrated one may be impacted by the migration. In this situation, short of concluding that the challenge is too complex or costly to solve, there are again several options: One is to bite the bullet and modify each integration point individually, as done in the first example. This will probably be costly, and may not yield a solution that will be significantly better next time there is another application migration to undertake. Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 14

15 One is to actually migrate more systems than initially planned that is, move the entire spaghetti of integrated applications to cloud computing. The connections between the applications, which used to be local to the customer s data center, are now local to the cloud service, and as a result they are less likely to be impeded by firewall rules or performance issues. If the configuration of the cloud provider s systems is different enough from the legacy environment, some changes may still be needed for the migrated collection of applications to work. Finally, a smart but potentially difficult solution is to eliminate the technical debt accumulated with the old architecture and move to an ESB or equivalent. The new architecture incorporates from the start the requirement that some of the systems connected to the service bus, or some of the applications providing the Web services, may be cloud-based while others are onpremises. This would in general be the recommended approach, unless it brings performance problems. Example 2. Multiple applications, some located in cloud services and some on-premises, may depend on shared master data. For example, an Accounts Receivables application, a CRM application, and a Call Center application all require an authoritative list of clients. Here, the ease of migrating to use cloud computing depends on whether there is a Master Data Management (MDM) initiative in place: Without an MDM strategy, each application has its own separate client database, updated manually. This is not a desirable situation in terms of data quality and end-to-end business process integration, but on the other hand, migrating one or more of these applications (with their associated client databases) to a cloud service will not be a problem. Organizations that have implemented MDM have either chosen one of these applications to hold the master customer data, or implemented a separate system of record for customer data. Each time a transaction (human or automated) submits a customer name or number, the application invokes the system or record to verify the information and to obtain the other customer data attributes it needs to do its work. In that case, moving some of the applications to the cloud may be problematic: the frequency of invocations may be high, the protocol used (it might be direct reads from an SQL database, or a file transfer protocol for replication) may not be supported between the on-premises system and the cloud environment, or it may be too slow across the Internet. To address this MDM scenario, there are some possibilities. One approach is to place a partial cache of the master data on the same system (or the same local network) where the migrated application will reside, and synchronize the cache with the master as the network bandwidth permits, or even through a daily batch refresh (taking into account how current the cache needs to be in order for business to be transacted as required). Another solution is to use stored procedures, which reduce the interactions with a central relational database, as well as the amount of data sent across the network. Stored procedures may also address some security issues by keeping sensitive data within an on-premises database server. Step 5: Address Security & Privacy Requirements Security and privacy are two of the issues that concern cloud service customers the most. Depending on the sector, these may be just above or below concerns about availability and performance as highest priority. At the same time, cloud service customers should remember that many of the security and privacy concerns raised by cloud computing have existed since the first forms of IT outsourcing were introduced. Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 15

16 Security involves multiple concerns. It includes such aspects as: How hard is it for an intruder to steal confidential data from the cloud provider s systems (external threat)? If this happens, will you even know it? Can you trust the provider s personnel, especially system administrators who have many privileges over the systems you use (internal threat)? What does the SLA promise you in terms of security measures? What is the impact on your business of a denial-of-service attack, which may not endanger your data but prevents users from accessing the application? How do you authorize an employee to access a system or application in the cloud? How do you unauthorize them, and how quickly can you do that in a serious situation (termination for cause, etc.)? What levels of trust do you grant different users, and how do you identify and authenticate trusted users? How do you prove to a client or an auditor that adequate security measures are in place, now that this is not only your problem, but a shared responsibility between you and a cloud provider? How can you verify that the virtualization platform or cloud management software running on the systems you use, which you did not install and do not control, does not contain malware? How can you protect yourself from malware that could be introduced by another customer in a multi-tenant environment? What is the risk that your data will be delivered to a domestic or foreign law enforcement agency by the cloud service provider in response to a legally binding request? The reader will find more extensive treatment of these issues in the CSCC s white paper entitled Security for Cloud Computing: 10 Steps to Ensure Success. [9] Privacy is closely related to security, but it carries with it the additional burden that a violation of privacy, for example the disclosure of PII about your own users or customers to people who do not have a right to access it, will cause major damage to your company, including: Loss of business Legal action by the people whose information has been disclosed Non-compliance with government regulations In addition, data subjects may have rights to inspect and correct PII that relates to them, which will need to be supported by the application even when it runs in a cloud service. Now that we have examined all the risks and threats that arise when migrating an application to the cloud, it turns out that doing so may, in fact, increase its security. This statement is based on two facts: Cloud service providers have, in all likelihood, more expert resources at their disposal than many of their customers. They need to make that investment because a successful attack could damage their entire business. Therefore, customer data may be safer in the cloud provider s custody than in customer s in-house systems. This is the same principle that leads people to rent a safe deposit box at their bank rather than keeping their valuables at home. Once your data is held in a cloud service, an attacker who specifically wants to gain access to your information no longer knows exactly where to attack. Even if they successfully penetrate Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 16

17 the network of the cloud provider, there may be thousands of virtual servers whose names do not reveal whose data they contain. Knowing all the above, here are some logical steps to follow (again, see the Security in the Cloud white paper for more information). Note that as a result of performing these tasks, you will never be 100% protected, and after a risk analysis you may even end up deciding that you cannot in fact migrate certain data or applications. But they will certainly increase the chances of success. 1. Understand exactly what data (including what code, since code may be the confidential asset to protect) will be migrated to the cloud service. 2. Map this data to your security classification. If a security classification does not exist, or if it does not specify where and in which format (cleartext vs. encrypted) data may be held on the basis of its classification, this is an issue that must be resolved. 3. Identify which information raises privacy concerns for example, account numbers, dates of birth, addresses, etc. 4. Examine applicable regulations (especially in the finance and health domains) and determine what needs to be done to meet these regulations, and whether it is possible to meet these demands while migrating to cloud computing. 5. Perform the normal risk management tasks of assessing the risk of security or privacy violations, and the impact on the business. 6. Review the cloud providers security/privacy measures (including physical security, personnel screening, incident notifications, etc., not just the technical security protection measures), and make sure that they are documented in the cloud SLA. 7. Determine whether the results of these steps actually allow the project to continue. 8. Consider and implement ways in which the information can be protected in four different situations: a. During the bulk migration of data from the on-premises system to the cloud service, when the cloud service is provisioned. This can be a weak point of the whole process, as an entire database backup may be carried physically, or shipped via courier, to the cloud service provider s site. b. Data at rest, while stored in the cloud. An obvious solution for sensitive data is to encrypt the data, and the practical question is whether the provider can perform this service, or whether the client needs to research and implement a solution. c. Data in motion, during the routine exchange of data that occurs while using the cloud based application. Encrypting data in transit is advisable, but runs into some issues: the cloud provider must support the encryption chain, cryptographic keys may need to be installed at both ends (requiring a key management solution), and on-the-fly encryption may affect transfer speeds. d. Data in use, that is when the data is actually read and processed by an application. For sensitive data, it may be advisable for the application to encrypt the data. This may not be possible if the migrated application is a commercial one that can only read the data in clear text from a database. A customer written application, on the other hand, can be modified to read/write encrypted data, so that only some temporary memory buffers will contain clear text data. The handling of encryption keys is a concern. 9. Design how to authenticate and authorize users. For systems that have their own sign-on facility, there may be no impact (as long as passwords are not sent in clear text from the user s workstation to the cloud-based system, which should not be the case even for an on-premises system). But if there is any form of Enterprise or Single Sign-On (SSO) facility, making this work Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 17

18 from an application running in a cloud service may require integration work. An enterprise identity and access management system (IdAM) needs to be accessible from the application migrated to the cloud service. You will need to understand which protocols are supported by the IdAM and by the cloud service additional integration components may be required to enable them to interoperate. 1 The silver lining is that once that effort has been made for the first migration, it should make future migrations easier. 10. Regardless of the solution chosen for authentication and authorization, you need to make sure that your user de-provisioning process can be executed quickly. Disabling a user s credentials for access to cloud systems may be even more critical than disabling their access to an on-premises system. The reason is that access to an internal system may be made immediately impossible or more difficult if someone has been escorted out the door; but might still be able to access the login page of a cloud application from the browser on their smartphone. 2 Step 6: Manage the Migration Finally, having thoroughly defined on paper the why, what, and how of the application migration project, the IT department can plan, execute and manage the actual application migration. Executing a migration is a complex and delicate project, and as such it should have a formal project plan and a skilled project manager. The migration plan, like all project plans, should track tasks, durations, resources, costs, and risks. Table 2 highlights the key components and considerations of the application migration procedure. 1 Example IdAM protocols include LDAP, OpenID, SAML, WS-Federation and Active Directory. 2 Note that if a single federated IdAM is used this risk is reduced since the user is removed once centrally for all applications. Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 18

19 Migration Procedure 1. Deploy the Cloud Environment. Provision, install and test the necessary storage, compute, network and security resources that constitute the cloud environment in which the migrated application will run. 2. Install and Configure the Applications. The applications and supporting middleware should now be installed and configured on the cloud servers. Cloud service providers frequently do this through automated deployment of templates. 3. Harden the Production Environment. Install additional utilities for business continuity and security. Note that some of these services may be provided by the cloud service provider, in which case they do not need to be installed, but they should still be tested. 4. Execute a Mock Migration. Undergo a trial run of the migration project plan to uncover unintended results or unnoticed issues during the planning phase. The mock migration date should be Migration Details The first part of the cloud environment to be laid down is the structure of the virtual network. In private cloud architecture, this would typically be done according to the organization s pre-established standards for network addressing. For public cloud services, however, the network structure is often prescribed in advance by the cloud service provider. For virtual private cloud implementations, connecting the VPN to existing internal networks may require significant work to match network addressing spaces, namespaces and other network aspects. Create individual virtual machines and attach them to their respective storage units. Reconfigure the domain name service (DNS) by updating the name servers to resolve the newly created VMs through the network gateways. Provision security devices including firewalls and VPN routers. Configure directory services access by implementing and testing the connections between the cloud service and the organization s directory server (LDAP, Active Directory, etc.) or, if specified by the architecture, the federation between the cloud service provider s authentication system and the customer s. Implement all integrations between cloud applications and other applications or resources, including directory services. All monitoring solutions should be implemented and tested, including any add-on monitoring tools. If the cloud application servers are to manage and monitor licenses, apply the activation kits and keys. If the existing monitoring and key services are to be reused, make and test the connections from the application servers to these resources. Put in place and test automated backup capabilities. Install and configure anti-virus software or malware protection. Issue to all project team members their initial credentials for cloud service access, per their role in the project or ongoing operation. Ensure that all contractual aspects are in place with the cloud service provider, since the subsequent tasks will start consuming cloud services. Since it is important to simulate all aspects of the final migration, schedule downtime for the existing systems during the time required to make the migration, and notify users in advance. Import application data and configuration settings into the cloud Copyright 2013 Cloud Standards Customer Council Page 19